Is Wine Destined to be a Specialist's Toolkit?

Bryan Porter asks: "I've been using various Wine based products lately (ex. WineX, CrossOver, etc.), and have found several companies basing portions of the software on Wine (I believe Virtuoso 3.0 utilizes Wine to some extent). My question for the Slashdot community is, is Wine destined for specialization only? We've got well-working versions of Wine hacked into a cross-platform gaming system, hacked into cross-platform productivity systems, etc. Will we ever download just one Wine, or is the best solution a customized one?"

Wine Hacking

[GotSanity]

I have noticed a few programs involving wine. It is interesting to see so much software involving a utility that makes code that global. I wonder where the idea of universaly (SP?) executable code is going?

wine for gaming

[Doobian Coedifier]

This year, I decided to make the leap from dual-boot to linux only on my desktop (MS was wastin' my disk space). Of course, I had to have Counter-Strike, or I would've gone mad. I started off with plain-vanilla wine, but even with opengl configured perfectly, I couldnt get the fps I needed (my machine 866mhz p3 512mb ram, geforce2 32mb vid card). I got winex 2.x, which worked marginally better, but still not acceptable. When winex 3.0 came out, I snatched it up. My fps is decent now, but still not native-Windows quality. I guess the moral of the story is: specialized wines are better. I think it's terriffic that so many people/groups are utilizing the wine core, and optimizing it for whatever. Thanks to TransGaming [transgaming.com] and others.

Multiple variations can be a strength

[Per Cederberg]

Look at the number of people running "tweaked" Linux kernels, instead of the "vanilla" version from Linus. The same thing applies to Wine.

People have special needs, and it is a good thing that software can be adapted for that. Now, as Wine is a compability layer, it is even more sensible than most other software to special needs in different environments. So don't expect the specialized variations to go away anytime soon.

Also, it is not necessarily a bad thing that there are many variations out there. As long as the improvements all trickle back to the common source everyone will reap the benefits eventually. (Now, older versions of Wine are not LGPL, but whatever.)

Too difficult

[kamukwam]

I have tried to use wine a few times in the past. And it took too much time to set up the emulator. And when it worked finally, most of my windows programs used functions that wine couldn't handle yet. Because Windows keeps changing, it will be difficult to catch with the changes every time.